The cards that American banks are switching to are chip-based (and EMV-compatible) because of new regulations, however, the vast, vast majority of them are going to be chip-and-signature, not chip-and-pin like in Europe. This unfortunately means that the special signature procedures for Americans will continue to hold you up in line, for the foreseeable future.

The cards that American banks are switching to are chip-based (and EMV-compatible) because of new regulations, however, the vast majority of them are going to be chip-and-signature, not chip-and-pin like in Europe. This unfortunately will still lead to inability to pay at automated machines with no attendants.

Perhaps you're right. It's possible that they are just offering a time-limited free version upgrade straight up, and that all other licensing policies are the same. That's an interesting theory for the reason too.

I would call their OEM licenses up to Windows 7 relatively cheap, but not super-cheap. I meant super-cheap as in $50 or under, how Apple had been pricing OS X upgrades before they went free in the most recent versions.

"It's a trap" may actually have been premature. Let's see the details first. Maybe they are just going the same route as Apple did, but the thing is they don't have the big hardware profits that Apple does, so I don't know what their plan is.

Is it integrated into the BIOS, or are they doing the traditional thing of recording the serial numbers of your CPU, hard drives, etc, and flagging any changes?

Actually retail licenses are supposed to be transferable as you upgrade computers, etc. OEM licenses, on the other hand like you described, are tied to the specific hardware.

Reading that blog in more detail, I think I understand what they are doing. "Supported lifetime of the device" *probably* means that the license will be tied to the hardware and will not be transferable. Perhaps they will generally make licenses super-cheap, but not transferable? Or perhaps they will go subscription-only on new devices.

"IT'S A TRAP!" may be appropriate here. We will find out for sure soon enough.

Windows 2000 was not based on Windows 9x, so did not run on top of DOS. It was instead an upgrade to Windows NT 4, with some added integration to allow Windows 9x programs to run, so it was the first OS that unified both the enterprise branch (NT) and consumer branch (9x) of Windows. So Windows XP was not new in that regard. Think of XP as Windows 2002, or Windows 2000 with a candy-like interface on top and a few other improvements. Here's an NT history for reference, showing the version progression from NT 3.1 up to Windows 10: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

The Windows 8 improvements over 7 are worth it. Speed and security to name a couple. Especially when you consider that if you really can't handle the interface you can easily download free utilities to make it look like Windows 7.

The fact is that even though people like to gripe and moan, every version of Windows on the NT branch as outlined in the Wikipedia article above has been an improvement over the previous version.

I would say not. In most places that I know of in the US, K-12 education is funded to a large extent by property taxes, which means that rich districts have a lot more resources than poor districts.

I did a quick search and found this very brief article about it: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wherew...

The actual proportions and differences very likely vary greatly depending on state and locality.

Unfortunately, even though I have not upgraded my Nexus 4 to Lollipop, I still received the new Calendar (and all other Google Apps) as part of the regular Play store app updates. I don't like the new calendar either. Still getting used to some of the changes, and still haven't figured out how to do some things. For instance, how to set the default calendar for new appointments - I ended up putting some personal appointments on my work calendar and can't move them. Now I have to manually pick my personal calendar (which is the Google account, so you would think it would be the default) each time I create an appointment.

Another thing I don't like about the new app design guidelines is that they made the menu buttons on the top bar way too small. You almost have to use your pinky to get them, even though there's plenty of room for bigger buttons.

Great, thanks again for your responses.

Yeah, thanks for sharing, for sure. How recently did you speak to them? I will share this with others here too. I wish that this was more publicized.

Wow, that's some crazy stuff from them. Thanks for the response!

Hi there, I'm a fellow IT guy and have a question about something you said:

Do you have any links to Apple's recommendation to not use OSX with file server, especially SMB file servers? We have Mac users who have occasional issues with our Windows file servers, and it would be very handy to be able to reference that article.

Thanks!

Those are fair points. I just wanted to mention some other car expenses to think about.